Category: Horror

Kris [insert last name here] and his four best friends, Lisa, Rosa, Xavier, and Peter, are running late to their college graduation ceremony. Because none of them majored in basic street smarts, they accept a ride from a stranger in a van claiming to be a student. The next thing they know, they are trapped in some kind of scientific facility, the only exit barred by lasers. The friends recognize each other, but find themselves unable to recall anything of their past life. A mask appears above them on screen and claims that some of them have been keeping terrible secrets(!), and in order to extract these particular memories and reveal their guilt, Kris must play a game using the nearby console, in which he must deliver protective haloes to all his friends before time runs out, lest they drown.

If you’re still keeping up with RPG Maker horror games in 2016 (I know I am!), then first of all the two of us need a new hobby, and second of all you’ve probably heard that the twinkly lolita spectacle Pocket Mirror has finally been released, three years after its initial demo, and clocking in at around 6 hours, it’s an artistic behemoth. How does Pocket Mirror compare to games like Ib and The Witch’s House, which it credits as sources of inspiration? Well, since the good stuff about this game should be immediately obvious (spoiler alert: it’s the artwork), in this review I’ll do what I do best and focus on the bad stuff! I am fun at parties.

In Welcome to the Game, you search the Deep Web for the hidden address of what is apparently the only Red Room — that is, a website where you can view and interact with a snuff film in real time (Like, Twitch plays murder basically) — in existence. Red Rooms are fairly well accepted as a myth, but that never stopped our imaginations from putting games on Steam. And now, thanks to the help of your friend Adam, you have all the necessary tools to hack and double-forward-slash your way across a pretend version of the anonymous internet.

Finally, six years after the North American release of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors and four years after Virtue’s Last Reward made the scene — after a drought of nothing but bad news for the future of the franchise — arrives the third and final game in the Zero Escape trilogy, Zero Time Dilemma, available on Steam no less, the one that was supposed to amaze us, knock us dead, answer all our lingering questions in a whiz-bang, no holds barred finale, and still get us home in time for dinner. So how does it hold up?

Nothing actually scary happens in the body of this film. Once WifeSister looks at a book cover and the point of view shot shows the doll on it with some sort of loud jarring sound, but that’s about it. In fact, Baby Blues informs a feature-length film’s worth of disparaging commentary rather than a legitimate review, which is why I am going to instead review only the last ten seconds of the film.